There are those who believe that, in terms of sheer lyrical sophistication and out-and-out wordsmithery, nobody else in the ’80s matched August Darnell, a mixed-race former high school English teacher born in Montreal who’d written his Master’s thesis on Richard Wright and Harlem Renaissance authors. Some say he didn’t hit full stride until he started conceiving his albums as full-blown conceptual musical-theater revues (starting with 1981’s island-hopping Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places); one might also argue that a retrospective like the Berlin label Strut’s wide-ranging (and very ZE-heavy) 2008 Going Places: The August Darnell Years is the easiest place to familiarize yourself with the dapper fellow. But the pan-tropical new wave Off the Coast of Me — Kid Creole’s first album, even though Darnell kept his face off the cover for contractual reasons — still sounds fresh start-to-finish three decades later. Mister Softee” is an even better erectile dysfunction song than Elastica’s “Stutter,” if not Freda Payne’s “Band Of Gold”; “Darrio” is probably the only song ever about shunning Studio 54 to dance to the B-52s and James White at punk-rock clubs. And if you’re bothered by however many layers of irony it took to cover World War II German love-lied “Lili Marlene,” the addition on the album’s 2003 Rainman Records reissue of “There But for the Grace of God Go I”—a hit for Darnell in its 1979 Machine version, and an even better song about suburban white flight than Billy Joel’s “Movin’ Out”—makes up for it.